The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Estefania Puerta: Laughing Death Drive

At the heart of Puerta’s practice is her deep engagement with materials. She incorporates a wide range of organic and inorganic elements—stained glass, fungi, plants, shells, minerals, quail eggs, resin, animal fur, essential oils, and photographs—to create works that evoke both familiarity and the otherworldly. Many of the objects she uses hold personal or cultural weight, such as volcanic rock from Colombia’s Nevado del Ruiz or her own cédula de identidad, a national ID used throughout Central and South America.

Sited in the Museum’s atrium, Garganta Cueva is a sloping chartreuse-green case crowned with eighteen metallic, breast-like mounds. A curled-up canine form rests within, while an array of poetically charged objects are embedded across the surface. The work reflects Puerta’s ongoing explorations of containers—not only as physical enclosures, but as metaphors for how bodies, spaces, and systems harbor memory, meaning, and power. Like a tomb or sarcophagus housing ritual tokens and a life's essence, the work becomes a monument to a selfhood shaped by what we gather and what is imposed upon us. At its center, the dog—an homage to her own companion, Mugre—embodies the tensions Puerta often examines, where protection slips into confinement, comfort is entangled with vulnerability, and domesticity drifts into the untamed.

In 2024 Puerta was awarded the Philip Guston Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome and spent six months living and working abroad and deepening her fascination with reliquaries and devotional tablets. Laughing Death Drive channels the tactile, communicative nature of these ancient forms, approaching language as something felt rather than read—where meaning emerges not only from content, but through rhythm, material cadence, and the physical trace of its making. Like Garganta Cueva, Laughing Death Drive serves as an expression of presence—compressing emotion and symbolism into a meticulously arranged composition, and continuing Puerta’s investigation of how objects preserve personal and collective histories.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a ‘zine.

Estefania Puerta was born in 1988 in Manizales, Colombia, and lives and works in Huntington, VT.

Estefania Puerta: Laughing Death Drive is organized by Caitlin Monachino, Curatorial and Publications Manager, as part of Aldrich Projects, a quarterly series that features one work or a focused body of work by a singular artist on the Museum's campus.